LIFE LIVED MORE DEEPLY - One More Feeble Attempt To Wrap Words Around It

Life Lived More Deeply is not a discipline or a path or a teaching or a paradigm. It is an experience.

It is not an experience which can be developed or created or controlled. It is a gift. We cannot even intentionally cultivate gratitude for this experience. When we do observe gratitude for the experience, that too is a gift. “Just thank the thanking when it comes.”

Key to this Life Lived More Deeply experience is a melting away of the experience of separation. We “drop down into” the flow of life and know – if only for a moment – that we are nothing other than Life, which is everything. We, in that moment, let go of trying to do or be anything. We trust – trust Life, trust the moment, trust our life.

Any attempt to hold on to this experience or to “do” it more often will only increase the hold of the ego – the part of us that thinks it is the doer, that attempts to run our lives.

We will know that the experience of Live Lived More Deeply is taking root in us when we observe ourselves letting go of all dichotomies – good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, me vs. them.

Even the classic spiritual dichotomy of love vs. fear begins to be exposed as adversarial. “Love is good and fear is bad.” From the perspective of the unitive experience, fear is no less valuable than love. It is all part of the dance, part of the unfolding of our humanity, part of our connection with the rest of humanity and even the rest of the animal kingdom.

If, as A Course in Miracles says, fear is the core emotion underlying all other unpleasant feelings, then we get really curious about and loving towards this experience of fear in all its forms. Life Lived More Deeply would suggest that it is counterproductive to follow any program which pits love against fear, which attempts to uproot fear and replace it with love.

If there is one spiritual “practice” that has relevance to the unfolding of Life Lived More Deeply, it would be the ancient Buddhist practice of tonglen, popularized recently by Pema Chodron. In this practice, rather than “breathe in the good, breathe out the bad” as the New Agers would recommend, we breathe in whatever pain we are feeling – drink it in deeply, feel it as fully as we can, pay attention to all its nuances. We then breathe out a wish for our healing from this painful state. The next, crucial step in this practice is to breathe in that painful feeling for all our suffering brothers and sisters who are experiencing this same kind of pain – most of whom have nowhere near our resources for coping with it – then breathe out a wish for their healing also, not just our own.

But Life Lived More Deeply would encourage that we not even “practice” tonglen. To attempt to “develop” this practice will again only reinforce the idea that “I” am some separate thing, capable of “doing” things, of steering the boat. From this perspective, we notice the tonglen experience when it is happening – including when we are reading about it, listening to a CD about it, or hearing a teacher describe it or take us through it. We are grateful for this experience as it is happening and notice how it may melt our struggle against the painful emotion. Observing it fully and being grateful for it may open the space in us for it to return. But when we crave even this experience of tonglen we get back on the wheel of attachment. And when we start to create a program around it – even the intention to repeat the tonglen practice – the ego digs in deeper. If, tomorrow, we notice ourselves sit in a chair and go back to the tonglen experience, this may be beautiful – and gratitude is a wonderful response to seeing this shining, free moment unfold. When we think that we in any way did it, we wander back into the woods.